If you wanted to get to Sacramento from San Francisco in 1864, the most comfortable way to do it was to take a paddle wheel steamer. It had all the amenities of a good hotel. You could get a fine meal, a good drink or a haircut.

The steamer Washoe advertised its price as 50 cents for a deck ticket and a dollar for a well-furnished cabin.

But on Sept. 5, 1864, taking the Washoe was a bad idea.

The riverboat, 6 months old, had a history of leaking boilers and getting into collisions with other riverboats, especially the steamer Yosemite.

Capt. George Washington Kidd, owner of the Washoe, started as a cabin boy on the Mississippi, working his way up to steward and then to clerk in 10 years. In 1849, he came to California and mined and then went into the banking business. He decided to challenge the near monopoly of Sacramento riverboat traffic held by the California Steam Navigation Co. He sold shares and called his company the California Navigation and Improvement Co.

He contracted a San Francisco firm to build the Washoe with extra-big boilers. These leaked so badly, however, that the U.S. inspector for the Port of San Francisco said the Washoe could be operated only at 118 pounds of pressure, not the 150 that Kidd had hoped for. The boilers were repaired repeatedly.

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The competition on the river was fierce. The Washoe's engineer, D.M. Anderson, was heard saying he would beat the steamer Chrysopolis if he had to operate at 180 or 200 pounds of steam.

At 9:30 p.m. Sept. 5, a faulty boiler on the Washoe exploded. Passengers and crew members, many scalded horribly, were thrown into the river.

The Chrysopolis, which had passed the Washoe and was about four miles ahead of it, continued toward Sacramento, its crew and passengers unaware of the explosion.

The Antelope, which had left San Francisco an hour and a half after the Washoe, came upon the scene close to midnight. Rescue operations began, and the Antelope reached Sacramento at 4:30 a.m.

"All the living passengers, injured or uninjured, who could be found, were brought to the city. ... The scene on board (the Antelope) was such as has rarely been witnessed on the Pacific Coast. The floor of the cabin and a portion of the deck were covered with the dead and wounded," reported the Alta California the next day.

The Vernon House was turned into a temporary hospital. All the doctors who could be found came to care for the injured.

Of the 176 passengers and 29 crew members, 54 were killed, 19 were seriously injured, 23 had minor injuries and 67 were reported missing.

About a month later, the coroner's jury blamed the disaster on the Washoe's two engineers: Anderson, who died in the disaster, and the second engineer, William L. Phillips.

Kidd raised the Washoe and sold it that October to the Oakland Ferry and Railroad Co.